Reality Factory (open source)

[Tami]

Ever dream of creating your own games? Already tried your hand at creating a Half-Life, Quake III or Unreal engine mod, but want to make the jump to something you can actually license and publish? Don't know how to program, but want to create your own game demo to show off to get one of the elusive designer jobs in the game industry?

You need the [url=\"http://www.realityfactory.info/cms/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1\"][b]Reality Factory Game Creation Suite[/b][/url] - the freely available toolkit that truly lets you create complete, commercial quality games without knowing any programming. RF GCS provides a complete toolkit for creating 3D action, adventure, role-playing, machinima and many other types of games straight out of the box.

For the advanced developers, you can feel safe knowing that - if your project requires it - you can get into the source code without any extra licensing fees.

Reality Factory is a program that - in conjunction with other tools - allows you to create 1st and 3rd person perspective games without programming! Reality Factory is built on top of the powerful Genesis3D Open Source engine and supports all major 3D graphics cards.

Reality Factory provides most of the tools you need to make a game. You will still need a program to create actors (characters and props in your game) and software to make textures with, but what you won't need is a C/C++ compiler and a couple of coders to build your engine for you. By using objects called "entities" which you place in your world, you can set up a game - with audio effects, multiple soundtracks, and special effects.

Reality Factory is intended to be a "rapid game prototyping tool" - it is able to make playable, interesting games across a wide range of genres but it's not optimized for any ONE kind of game. While you can certainly make a good game with Reality Factory, and even give it away and/or sell it to others, you won't see the kind of blazing optimized speed that you would in other single-purpose engines (like Quake 3 or Unreal Tournament).

General Features

* Complete game & machinima creation system without requiring any programming knowledge
* Customizeable menu & HUD system
* Save/Load system
* Customizeable weapons system for melee & projectile weapons
* Predefined character and camera controls provide 1st and 3rd person (fakk2 style, diablo style, resident evil cinematic style) viewpoints, changeable on-the-fly in-game as desired
* Complete interactive conversation engine, complete with a GUI conversation tree builder for writing your conversation scripts

Scripting

* Integrated scripting engine (SimKin) for NPC, cinematic & in-game sequence scripting for customizing in-game behaviour and actions
* Customizeable script editor for creating your scripts
* In-depth NPC pawn system, scriptable NPC & PathPoint engine

Physics

* Basic physics, collision detection

Lighting & Shadows

* Per vertex, lightmapping, radiosity
* Dynamic colored (RGB) lighting
* Pre-computed lighting
* Projected Shadows
* Stencil Shadow Volumes

Texturing

* Basic multi-texturing, bump-, sphere-, mip-mapping, procedural textures
* Video AVI & animated GIF support for cutscenes and animated level textures
* Support for compressed textures
* Up to 32 bit alpha-transparent textures
* Dynamic texturing effects such as procedurals, animations and morphing

Scene Management

* BSP/Portal rendering system
* LOD system

Animation

* Keyframe animation, skeletal animation, animation blending

Special Effects

* Customizeable effects & explosions system
* Billboarding, particle system, skybox/skydome, water, fire, explosion, decals, fog, rain, mirrors, teleporters, jumppads, lighting bolts, screen shaking, morphing fields, animated flipbooks, curved surfaces

Sound

* 3D audio engine with mp3, wav and ogg support

Reality Factory comes in two parts - the actual program and resources which run your game and the tools used to develop the game. The tools provided are:

* RFEdit Pro - level editor for building your game worlds
* rfPack - creates and modifies texture libraries used by the level editor
* IniEditor - edits the realityfactory.ini file used by RF
* AStudio - builds actors from the files output by your modelling program
* ActView - allows you to look at your actors and view their animations
* TreeBuilder - creates scripts used in the conversation system
* rfVFS - creates and modifies Pak files to contain all your game resources
* ttf2font - converts TTF fonts to bitmap fonts usable by Reality Factory
* AlphaCreate - creates TGA files with alpha channel from a colored image and an alphamap
* RFScriptEditor - create and edit your game scripts

While Reality Factory comes with many game creation tools, you'll need a couple of other programs to do anything other than a bare-room walkthrough.

First, you will need some kind of a paint program to make textures with. I recommend GIMP, it's an excellent free image manipulation program. Another free paint program is Deep Paint 2. Also CorelDraw or Adobe Photoshop will work, and so will any other program that creates Windows bitmap (.bmp) files.

Second, you will need a 3D modelling program to make actors (characters and props) with. [url=\"http://www.turbosquid.com/gmax\"]Gmax[/url] is the free game development level editor based on the 3D animation platform Autodesk 3ds Max. Combined with the .act exporter plugin on the Word Of Genesis site, you are ready to start making your actors. The shareware modelling program Milkshape3D will take apart and output Genesis3D actors and is cheap to register ($25). You can also use TrueSpace (v3.2 is free and you can get it from caligari.com, v5.2 is $199, v6.6 $395, v7 $595) with the TrueGene exporter to create Genesis3D actors. Finally, you can get Discreet's Autodesk 3ds Max with Character Studio - Reality Factory supports Genesis3D actors created with v2.5, v3.1, v4, v5, v6 or v7.

Reality Factory uses Microsoft DirectX
Operating Systems

Supported operating systems are:

* Windows98
* Windoes98 SE
* Windows ME
* Windows 2000 Professional (Workstation)
* Windows XP (Home and Professional)

The following operating systems are [b]NOT[/b] supported:

* Windows 95
* Windows NT (any version)
* Mac OS
* Linux
* BEOS

Minimum Hardware Requirements

* 500 MHz Intel Pentium III or AMD Athlon processor
* 128 MB RAM
* 4 speed CD/DVD drive
* 250 MB of free hard disk space
* 32 MB video card with DirectX 8.1 compatible drivers
* DirectX 8.1 compatible sound card
* Keyboard
* Mouse

Recommended Hardware Requirements

* 1(+) GHz Intel Pentium III or AMD Athlon processor
* 256(+) MB RAM
* 8 speed CD/DVD drive
* 500 MB of free hard disk space
* 64(+) MB video card with DirectX 8.1 compatible drivers
* DirectX 8.1 compatible sound card with surround sound
* Keyboard
* Mouse